updated 08:10 am EST, Mon December 21, 2009

Intel Atom gets longer battery life

Intel this morning finally began delivering Atom processors based on its Pine Trail platform. The chips are the first Atoms to be built on a 45 nanometer process and use about 20 percent less power on netbook-class processors and 50 percent less power on nettops. A new graphics core, the GMA 3150, moves to the main processor and not only reduces the footprint of the design by 60 to 70 percent but should improve performance by speeding up communication with the CPU.

The external chipset in Intel's official solution only needs to handle input/output for the rest of the system.

Three processors launch with the platform but aren't major performance upgrades, all running at 1.66GHz and focusing on battery life. The N450 is intended for netbooks and with 512K of L2 cache consumes just 7W of total thermal peak power, even including the chipset; the D410 is its desktop equivalent and uses 12W of power. A dual-core D510 model doubles the cache to L2 and uses 15W of total power.

Systems based on Pine Trail should launch just ahead of CES, on January 4th, and will include the ASUS Eee PC 1005P/PE, a new version of the Dell Mini 10, the Fujitsu M380 and MH380, the MSI Wind U130, U135, U140 and U160, and additional systems from Lenovo and Samsung.